Wednesday, October 11, 2006

More ATCs

Dear Shayne,

I've got a couple more ATCs to share, now that the people I made them for have received. Wanna see? And read all about my creative process in excruciating detail? Great! Let's go!

The first one was for a person who has a "foreign countries" themed book. I had a few stamps from New Zealand from a friend who lived there for a year, so I thought it might be fun to do NZ. Even though, um, I've never been there and really know very little about it. Sure! Why not?

In my head, I thought: "Map of NZ and these cool stamps! Done!" Of course, it's never that easy. I couldn't find a map that I liked, so I "made" one. I printed an outline of NZ on the back of this green paper I had (it's green there, right?) and even remembered to print it backwards so it was going the right way on the front! Yay! Turns out, there are a lot of nooks and crannies along the coastline of New Zealand. Cutting it out was a total pain in the ass. I apologize now to the citizens of New Zealand for the shape your country ended up in. I'm not so good with scissors, so some details, sadly, got lost.

So then I horsed around with these stamps that I had for a good long time, but really couldn't find a configuration that I liked. It was bad. In fact, at one point, I decided to just do Paris instead (got plenty of Paris themed rubber stamps, ephemera, and whatnot -- why not take the easy road?) But then I went to Scrapbook Territory (which is, dangerously, right down the street from my nearest Paper-Source. It's like all of the drug dealers needed to be in the same 'hood.) (Oh, and don't let that cute little bear on their site fool you -- that place is hard core with the paper, rubber stamps, and all kinds of crafty goodness. Scrapbook Territory: it's not just for scrapbookers anymore.)

While there, I stumbled upon this cool New Zealand paper that had the picture of the NZ dollar on it. It had some other stuff that I thought might work, but I didn't end up using. It was the dollar that brought it all together. Hmmm... I guess that is often the way in life, isn't it? Yeah, I'm deep.

For the second card, my recipient requested "Old timey carnival." I really had nothing on hand for this, but, again, found something great at the Scrapbook Territory. Well, I had the tiger sticker. Then Bill said, "Kelly, this card isn't for you..." ('cause I like tigers), but I think tigers are perfectly appropriate at the carnival. So there.

At any rate, on this paper I got, the clown was part of a clown posse (hmm... I think that's a band, but that's not what I meant -- it was just a group of clowns and I like the word "posse.") I was going to use the whole group, but I found that cutting this one guy out was way creepier. And that's what I was going for: creepy. I also found the sticker pack with the cotton candy on it at ST. I loooove cotton candy (It's sugar! Spun! Spun sugar! Yess!) so I knew I wanted to use that too.

So I had the clown, the ticket (both from the same piece of scary-ass carnival paper), the tiger sticker (from my stash), and the cotton candy sticker. As I was arranging them on this card, I glanced down at the sticker pack that the cotton candy came from and... saw the crying child. PERFECT. Perhaps it was a bit heavy-handed, as the rest of the card already sort of said, "The carnival is supposed to be fun, but it's actually pretty scary," BUT... how could I resist the weeping child? Not even the cotton candy can brighten THAT kid's day!